LinkedIn has made life so much easier for job seekers and recruiters alike. It acts as the world’s database for talent, and any smart recruiter can use this amazing channel to recruit the best talent from across the globe. In fact, LinkedIn has become the top recruitment platform, rivaling many recruitment agencies. LinkedIn’s recruitment platform is especially useful since it lets you do recruitment for free. So if you’re a recruiter and you want to scan for suitable candidates, here are seven tips for finding the best candidates on LinkedIn.

Know Who and What You’re Looking for

The first step to successfully finding a candidate on LinkedIn is to know who exactly you’re looking for and what kind of skills set you need. LinkedIn allows candidates to display not only their employment history but also their skill set and expertise. Furthermore, it also allows their contacts to endorse them for those specific skills and provide recommendations. However, endorsements and recommendations are sometimes generic and do not reflect the accurate skills or working style of an individual. You might want to rely less on them and focus more on the individual’s work history, their projects, their achievements, and their skills set. LinkedIn gives recruiters a complete biodata of candidates, including their awards, their courses, their interests and so on.

When you know who and what you’re looking for, then you can cut your job down by half. No need to spend hundreds of dollars hiring recruiters, no need to contact candidates just to find out they lacked the right skills set. Use LinkedIn well and you may be on your way to recruiting amazing talent without losing your mind or your money.

Make Effective Use of LinkedIn Groups

Similar to Facebook groups, you can create LinkedIn groups based on your company’s industry of service. So if you’re a marketing firm, you could probably create a “Marketing Experts on LinkedIn” group and attract the right people to join your group. Once there, initiate conversations in the group, post jobs, and get people to connect with you. Remember though, that groups need to be active. If you are a small organization that is already swamped with work, managing a LinkedIn group might not be the best idea unless you have other purposes of creating a group.

While you can create groups, you can also become a part of different groups. LinkedIn hosts thousands of groups that cater to almost every industry. The more you join meaningful groups, the better your chances of communicating with the right people and getting them to join your company. Remember that joining groups doesn’t mean you begin spamming them with repetitive job posts. Groups are meant to share ideas, informative pieces, and communicate professionally. Do not join a group just because you want to spam them with job postings.

Creating a Strong Network

LinkedIn thrives on networking and gives you plenty of opportunities to make acquaintances. The moment you sign up to the network, you are given the choice of either following your current friends who are already on LinkedIn or find new friends. Now although you want to add people to recruit them for later, don’t be too specific by adding people only to match your immediate recruitment needs. Build your network by adding people belonging to different fields and get to know them better. Also, make sure you add consultants, freelancers, and remote workers that you might need later. The more, the merrier.

Make Use of LinkedIn Premium

While most LinkedIn services are for free, there are also paid options for people who want to dig deeper into the data and access tools that making searching and recruiting candidates much easier. With the Premium service, you can find talent faster, access a wider database, and easily get in touch with passive candidates. Not only that, but you can also search for people meeting your exact needs and send out at least 30 InMail messages to your selected talents. This comes with a 30-day free trial, so if you don’t like it, you can go back to the free version.

Approach Multiple People at a Time

Don’t limit your efforts to just one person. Approach multiple people at a time after you have thoroughly reviewed their profile and want to take things further. Connect with them, discuss future prospectives, and get to know them better. Do try to maintain contact even if the deal doesn’t fall through because remember, LinkedIn isn’t about “adding to get the job done and then moving on.” It’s a network. You are meant to communicate, to share ideas, and to build the relationship by participating in various discussions.

Post Jobs on LinkedIn

While you’re recruiting people, connecting with them and building a network, you should also post your job on the platform. LinkedIn is much more sophisticated now than it was before, so you have options where recruiters can post jobs and candidates can apply directly without going through any other channel. You receive their profile and you can go communicate with them instantly. However, your posting would not bear fruits if you don’t have a strong network that can see or share your posts. Therefore, it is critical for you to build a network, post jobs, recruit candidates, scan through profiles and then make your choice.

Give it Some Time

Recruiting candidates via LinkedIn is not a magic pill that delivers results overnight. You need time and patience. You need tact and perception. It may seem daunting and you may want to simply pass on the task to a professional, but the point is, why involve someone else when you can easily manage the recruitment and selection of your organization’s candidates? If you’re a small business that cannot afford to spend money on hiring recruiters, LinkedIn is your best friend. If you’re a large organization looking to hire, LinkedIn is your best database.